Mariam AkubardiaThe Past is Behind Us (2024)

Mariam Akubardia's childhood unfolded in the shadow of occupied Gali, where every day was marked by “the weary faces of those waiting at bus stops, longing for a way back to Abkhazia”. Gali, the district on the Georgian-controlled side of the boundary with Abkhazia, is where Akubardia spent her formative years after her family was displaced during the war of the early 1990s. In 'The Past Is Behind Us', a man stands in the left foreground, in profile and dressed in dark clothing, his gaze turned away from the viewer and his expression closed. Behind him, a Soviet mosaic glows against the dark surroundings. Its swirling blue waves and golden sands frame a young woman in a pink swimsuit, seated at the water’s edge, her gaze directed toward the horizon. Scenes of leisure and ease of this kind once decorated the bus stops of the region as images of a carefree collective life. The artist remembers these mosaics as “cold, stark” symbols “of a lost era and a fractured homeland”, set against “a backdrop of burning houses”. The title’s “Behind Us” is spatial as well as temporal: the man turns his face away from the mosaic, bright and untouched, while he stays in the dark. In Akubardia’s practice, the surrounding architecture becomes an active presence, and the figure appears absorbed in an interior time, caught between a promised future that failed and a homeland that remains out of reach.